Employment is key to combating poverty. Thus, detractors of social assistance programs argue that they create disincentives to work. While there is substantial evidence showing limited effects of these programs on overall labor supply, the jury is still out with respect to their impact on formal...

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are an innovative and increasingly popular approach to social assistance. They provide money to poor families contingent upon certain behavior, usually investments in human capital such as keeping children in school or taking them to health centers on a regular...

We assess the non-contributory cash transfer systems in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries to identify factors that keep them from reducing poverty and inequality. To perform this assessment, we analyze three dimensions of size (number of beneficiaries, size of transfer per beneficiary,...